The Man From Beijing

by Henning Mankell

  ‘A cannibal,’ said Ytterström. ‘Is that what we’re looking for? Did we arrive and spoil his meal?’

  Something touched Sundberg’s hand. She gave a start. But it was only a snowflake, which soon melted.

  ‘A tent,’ she said. ‘We need a tent here. I don’t want the footprints obliterated.’

  She closed her eyes and suddenly saw a blue sea and white houses climbing up a warm hillside. Then she went back to the day traders’ house and sat down in their kitchen with the list of names.

  There must be something somewhere I haven’t noticed, she thought.

  She started to work her way slowly through the list. It was like walking through a minefield.

  4

  Vivi Sundberg had the feeling that she was studying a memorial to the victims of a major catastrophe, a plane crash or a sunken ship. But who would raise a memorial for the people of Hesjövallen who had been murdered one night in January 2006?

  She slid the list of names to one side and stared at her trembling hands. She was unable to keep them still.

  She shuddered, and picked up the list once again.

  Erik August Andersson

  Vendela Andersson

  Hans-Evert Andersson

  Elsa Andersson

  Gertrud Andersson

  Viktoria Andersson

  Hans Andrén

  Lars Andrén

  Klara Andrén

  Sara Andrén

  Elna Andrén

  Brita Andrén

  August Andrén

  Herman Andrén

  Hilda Andrén

  Johannes Andrén

  Tora Magnusson

  Regina Magnusson

  Eighteen names, three families. She stood up and went into the room where the Hanssons were sitting on the sofa, whispering to each other. They stopped when she entered.

  ‘You said there weren’t any children in this village? Is that right?’

  They both nodded.

  ‘And you haven’t seen any children during the last few days?’

  ‘When sons or daughters of the old folk come to visit, they sometimes bring their own children with them. But that doesn’t happen often.’

  Sundberg hesitated before continuing.

  ‘Unfortunately there is a young boy among the dead,’ she said.

  She pointed at one of the houses. The woman stared at her, eyes wide open.

  ‘You mean he’s dead as well?’

  ‘Yes, he’s dead. If what you’ve written is accurate, he was in the house with Hans-Evert and Elsa Andersson. Are you sure you don’t know who he is?’

  They turned to look at each other, then shook their heads. Sundberg went back to the kitchen. He’s the odd one out, she thought. Him and the couple living in this house, and Julia who suffers from dementia and has no conception of this catastrophe. But somehow or other, it’s the boy that doesn’t fit in.

  She folded up the sheet of paper, put it in her pocket and went out. A few snowflakes were drifting down. All around her was silence. Disturbed only by an occasional voice, a door being closed, the clicking of a forensic tool. Erik Huddén came towards her. He was very pale. Everybody was pale.

  ‘Where’s the doctor?’ she asked.

  ‘Examining the leg.’

  ‘How’s she doing?’

  ‘She’s shocked. The first thing she did was to disappear into a toilet. Then she burst out crying. But there are more doctors on the way. What shall we do about the reporters?’

  ‘I’ll speak to them.’

  She took the list of names from her pocket.

  ‘The boy doesn’t have a name. We must find out who he is. Make sure this list is copied, but don’t hand it out.’

  ‘This is beyond belief,’ said Huddén. ‘Eighteen people.’

  ‘Nineteen. The boy’s not on there.’

  She produced a pen and added ‘unidentified boy’ to the bottom of the list.

  Then she gathered the freezing cold and mystified reporters into a semicircle on the road.

  ‘I’ll give you a brief statement,’ she said. ‘You can ask questions, but we don’t have any answers at the moment. There’ll be a press conference later today in Hudiksvall. Provisionally at six o’clock. All I can say for now is that several very serious crimes were committed here during the night. I can’t give you any more details.’

  A young girl, her face covered in freckles, held up her hand.

  ‘But surely you can tell us a bit more? It’s obvious that something terrible has happened when you cordon off the whole village.’

  Sundberg didn’t recognise the girl, but the logo on her jacket was the name of a big national newspaper.

  ‘You can ask as many questions as you like, but I’m afraid that for technical reasons connected with the investigation, I can’t tell you any more for the moment.’

  One of the television reporters thrust a microphone under her nose. She had met him many times before.

  ‘Can you repeat what you’ve just said?’

  She did so, but when he tried to ask a follow-up question she turned her back on him and left. She didn’t stop walking until she came to the last of the tents that had been pitched. She suddenly felt very ill. She stepped to one side, took a few deep breaths, and only when she no longer felt the need to throw up did she approach the tent.

  Once, during one of her first years as a police officer, she had fainted when she and a colleague had entered a house and found a man hanging there. She would prefer not to have that happen again.

  The woman squatting down at the side of the leg looked up when Sundberg entered. A powerful spotlight made it very warm inside the tent. Sundberg introduced herself.

  ‘What can you tell me?’

  Valentina Miir, probably in her forties, spoke with a pronounced foreign accent. ‘I’ve never seen anything like this before,’ she said. ‘You come across limbs that have been pulled off or severed, but this one . . .’

  ‘Has somebody been trying to eat it?’

  ‘The probability is that it’s an animal, of course. But there are aspects that worry me.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Animals eat and gnaw at bones in a particular way. You can usually be more or less sure which particular animal has been involved. I suspect it was a wolf in this case. But there’s something else you ought to see.’

  She reached for a transparent plastic bag. It contained a leather boot.

  ‘We can assume that it was on the foot,’ she said. ‘Obviously, an animal can have pulled it off in order to get at the foot itself. But what worries me is that the shoelaces were undone.’

  Sundberg recalled that the other boot was tightly tied and on the man’s other foot. The leg belonged to Lars Andrén.

  ‘Is there anything else you’ve established?’

  ‘Not yet, it’s too soon.’

  ‘Can you come with me? I need your help.’

  They left the tent and went to the house where the unknown boy was lying with two other persons who were probably Hans-Evert and Elsa Andersson. The silence inside was deafening.

  The boy was lying in bed, on his stomach. The room was small, with a sloping roof. Sundberg gritted her teeth in order not to burst out crying. His life had barely begun, but before he could take another breath it had ended.

  They stood there in silence.

  ‘I don’t understand how anybody can commit such a horrendous attack on a small child,’ said Valentina eventually.

  ‘Can you see how many stab wounds he has?’ said Sundberg.

  The doctor leaned forward and directed the bedside lamp at the body. It was several minutes before she answered.

  ‘It seems that he has only one wound. And it killed him instantly.’

  ‘Can you explain further?’

  ‘It would have been quick. His spine has been cut in two.’

  ‘Have you had time to examine the other bodies?’

  ‘As I’ve said, I’m waiting for backup.’

  �
�But can you say off the top of your head how many of the other victims died from a single blow?’

  At first Valentina didn’t seem to understand the question. Then she tried to recall what she had seen.

  ‘None of them, I think,’ she said slowly. ‘Unless I’m much mistaken, all the others were stabbed repeatedly.’

  ‘And no single wound would have been fatal?’

  ‘It’s too soon to say for sure, but probably not.’

  ‘Many thanks.’

  The doctor left. Sundberg searched through the room and the boy’s clothes in the hope of finding something to indicate who he was. But found nothing, not even a bus pass. She went downstairs and out into the garden to the rear of the house overlooking the frozen lake. She tried to work out the significance of what she had discovered. The boy had died from a single blow, but all the rest had been subjected to more systematic violence. What could that mean? She could think of only one plausible explanation: whoever killed the boy hadn’t wanted him to suffer. Everyone else had been subjected to violence that was a sort of extended torture.

  She gazed at the distant mountains, veiled in mist beyond the lake. He wanted to torture them, she thought. Whoever wielded that sword or knife wanted them to know that they were going to die.

  Why? She had no idea. She was distracted by the sound of rotor blades approaching and went to the front of the house. A helicopter was descending over the wooded hillsides and soon landed in a field, whipping up a cloud of snow. Tobias Ludwig jumped out, and the helicopter set off again immediately, heading south.

  Sundberg went to meet him. Ludwig was wearing city shoes, and as he trudged through the snow it came well over his ankles. He looked to Vivi like a confused insect stuck in the snow and flapping violently with its wings.

  They met on the road as Ludwig was brushing himself down.

  ‘I’m trying to get my head around it,’ he said. ‘What you told me, that is.’

  ‘You have to see them. Sten Robertsson is here. I’ve done as much as I can in the way of resources. But now it’s up to you to make sure we get all the help we need.’

  ‘I still can’t get my head around it. Lots of dead old people?’

  ‘There’s a boy who’s the odd one out. He’s young.’

  She went through the houses for the fourth time that day. Ludwig kept groaning as he accompanied her from crime scene to crime scene and came to the tent where the leg was. The doctor was nowhere to be seen. Ludwig shook his head helplessly.

  ‘What on earth has happened? Surely only a madman could have done anything like this.’

  ‘We don’t know if it was just one. There could have been several of them.’

  ‘Madmen?’

  ‘Nobody knows.’

  He looked hard at her.

  ‘Do we know anything at all?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘This is too big for us. We need help.’

  Robertsson came walking along the road towards them.

  ‘This is horrendous, horrific,’ said Ludwig. ‘I doubt anything like this has ever happened before in Sweden.’

  Robertsson shook his head. Sundberg eyed the two men. The feeling that this was urgent, that something even worse might happen if they didn’t act quickly enough, became even stronger.

  ‘Get going on those names,’ she said to Tobias Ludwig. ‘I really need your help.’

  Then she took Robertsson by the arm and led him off along the road.

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I’m scared. Aren’t you?’

  ‘I don’t have time to think about it.’

  Sten Robertsson screwed up his eyes.

  ‘But you’re onto something, aren’t you? You always are.’

  ‘Not this time. There could have been ten of them, we just don’t know at the moment. We have absolutely nothing to go on. You’ll have to be present at the press conference, by the way.’

  ‘I hate talking to journalists.’

  ‘Too bad.’

  Robertsson left. She was about to go and sit down in her car when she noticed that Huddén was waving to her. He was approaching and had something in his hand. He must have found the murder weapon, she thought. That would be a stroke of luck.

  But Huddén was not carrying a weapon. He handed over a plastic bag. Inside it was a thin red ribbon.

  ‘The dog found it. In the forest. About thirty yards from the leg.’

  ‘Any footprints?’

  ‘They’re looking – but when the dog found the ribbon, he showed no sign of wanting to follow a trail.’

  She lifted the bag and peered closely at it.

  ‘It’s thin,’ she said. ‘It seems to be silk. Did you find anything else?’

  ‘No, that’s all. It seemed to sparkle in the snow.’

  She handed back the bag.

  ‘Well, we have something at least,’ she said. ‘At the press conference we can announce that we have nineteen dead bodies and a clue in the form of a red silk ribbon.’

  ‘Maybe we’ll find something else.’

  When Huddén had left she sat in her car to think. Through the windscreen she could see Julia being led away by a woman from the home-help service. Ignorance is bliss, thought Sundberg.

  She closed her eyes and let the list of names scroll through her mind. She still couldn’t connect the various names to the faces she had now seen on four different occasions. Where did it start? she wondered. One house must have been the first, another one the last. The killer, whether or not he was alone, must have known what he was doing. He didn’t pick the houses haphazardly, he made no attempt to break into the day traders’ house, or that of the senile woman.

  She opened her eyes and gazed out through the windscreen. It was planned, she thought. It must have been. But can a madman really prepare for that kind of deed? Surely it doesn’t add up.

  She poured out the last few drops of coffee from her Thermos. The motive, she thought. Even a lunatic must have a motive. Perhaps inner voices urge him to kill everybody who crosses his path. But would those voices point him to Hesjövallen of all places? If so, why? How big a role was played by coincidence in this drama?

  The boy may be the key, she thought. He doesn’t live in the village. But he dies even so. Two people who have lived here for twenty years are still alive. Then it dawned on her – something Erik Huddén had said. Did she remember correctly? What was Julia’s surname?

  Julia’s house wasn’t locked. She went in and read the document that Huddén had found on the kitchen table. The answer she found to her question made her heart start beating faster. She sat down and tried to marshal her thoughts.

  The conclusion she reached was improbable, but it might be correct anyway. She dialled Huddén’s number. He answered immediately.

  ‘I’m sitting in Julia’s kitchen. The woman standing on the road in her nightdress. Come here right away.’

  ‘Will do.’

  Huddén sat opposite her at the table. Then stood up again and looked down at the chair seat. Sniffed at it, then changed to another chair. She stared at him in bafflement.

  ‘Urine,’ he said. ‘The old lady must have peed herself. What did you want to say?’

  ‘I want to try out a thought on you. It seems implausible, but is somehow rational nevertheless. I have the feeling that there’s a sort of underlying logic to what happened here last night. I want you to listen, and then tell me if I’ve got the wrong end of the stick.

  ‘It’s to do with names,’ she began. ‘We still don’t know the boy’s name, but if I’m right he’s related to the Andersson family who lived and died in the house where we found them. A key to everything that happened here last night is the names. Families. People in this village seem to have been called Andersson, Andrén or Magnusson. Julia’s surname is Holmgren. Julia Holmgren. She’s still alive. And then we have Tom and Ninni Hansson. They’re also still alive, and have a different surname. It should be possible to draw a conclusion from that.’

&nbs
p; ‘That whoever did this, for some reason or other, was out to get people with those names,’ said Huddén.

  ‘Think another step ahead! This is a tiny little hamlet. People probably haven’t moved. Most likely there has been intermarriage between the families. I’m not talking about incest, just that there is good reason to believe that we’re not looking at three families, but perhaps two. Or maybe even only one. That may explain why Julia Holmgren and the Hanssons are still alive.’

  Sundberg paused for Huddén’s reaction. She didn’t consider him particularly intelligent, but she respected his ability to use his intuition.

  ‘If that is true, it must mean that whoever did this knew these people very well. Who would do that?’

  ‘Possibly a relative?’

  ‘A mad relative? Why would he want to do anything like this?’

  ‘We don’t know.’

  ‘How do you explain the severed leg?’

  ‘I can’t. But I think we have a start. That and a red silk ribbon are all we have.

  ‘I want you to go back to Hudiksvall,’ she said. ‘Tobias is supposed to be delegating officers to search for next of kin. Make sure that happens. And look for links between these three families. But keep it between you and me for the time being.’

  Shortly before half past five, some of the senior police officers gathered in Tobias Ludwig’s office to discuss the press conference. It was decided not to issue a list of names of the dead, but they would say how many people had been killed and admit that, so far, the police had no clues. Any information the general public could supply would be appreciated.

  Ludwig would give preliminary details, and then Sundberg would take over.

  Before entering the room crammed with reporters, she shut herself away in a toilet. She examined her face in a mirror. If only I could wake up, she thought. And find that this whole business had gone away.

  She went out, slammed her fist hard into the corridor wall several times, then went into the room chock-full of people and far too hot. She walked up to the little podium and sat down next to Tobias Ludwig.